Portland Social Media Blogging Experience

It's ok if your head is in the sand when it comes to social media, there are worse places it could be … like up your ____ .... and that is where it usually is when you are talking to many "professionals."

For many years the focus of marketers and advertisers has been to shout at consumers using their proverbial loudspeakers in the mass media. They measure their success through complex calculations representing their "return on investment." Use wikipedia and check out what that formula looks like. It's complicated and it sucks! I hate math!

I wonder what formula they used to make this gem appear a worthwhile investment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX-Zk_LNZWg

The fact is, and everyone knows this but everyone is afraid to say it, people can make numbers say whatever the hell they want. There are certain areas you cannot manipulate numbers ... say 1+1=2 ... but when you are trying to measure things that were never meant to be more than qualitative experiments from uncreative minds then you will always be doomed to data manipulation. A good idea is often universally acknowledged ... a bad idea or gamble is something you have to convince people of. Why do people continually buy cheap plastic s**** from China? Oh, it's because they are BRIBED by low prices to do so. You see what I am saying?

In the case of the Pinto ... if you are a car manufacturer in the 21st century you are going to know almost immediately when you put a piece of garbage off the assembly line. Within moments of a bumper falling off, or say an EXPLODING BUMPER (as the case of the Pinto) bloggers are going to be all over that ... sharing, linking, sharing some more. Perhaps in the 80's they could snuff the firestorm to buy some time, but now days that just wont happen.

But in all seriousness, there are other ways to measure your ROI and often times it involves the ancient (and rarely practiced) art of listening. Listening is to marketers as polka is to rock bands. It's foreign, it's unattractive, and for the cynical professional it's easy to write off as unfashionable. We're talking about humanizing an industry that revolves around numbers and calculations and lying and manipulation.

After all isn't marketing founded on the principal that if you say the same thing enough times, eventually people will believe it? (oh wait, that is what Goebbels and McDonalds said).

As Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell (http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/) says, the number one rule for utilizing social media is to focus on the relationships and not the technology. Otherwise you find yourself with accounts for Twitter, Plaxo, Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Linkedin and having never logged in since the day you signed up.

Translated, this means that it is not entirely necessary for your company to create a forum just because your competitor did so. Perhaps you can get the same effect by tapping into existing social networks on Myspace or Facebook. Perhaps you can save your company a lot of time and money by testing new ideas in these communities that already exist! That is what people mean when they talk about tapping into the Groundswell.

The world wide web contains forums, blogs, social networking sites and everyone is interconnected and possibly talking about you.

1. What can you learn from this swarm of interaction?
2. Better yet, how can you use this buzz to save your company money?
3. How can you corral these wild stallions and test new ideas?

Maybe I'll get the urge to write more next Friday when I find myself unemployed and crying in my 40 ... haha